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Comment by bjourne | Hacker News Reader

Same thing with Swedish. :( I feel kind of guilty myself because as a developer, I write almost exclusively in English. Most software related terms simply don't exist in Swedish and with everyone using English no new words are being invented.

It's even worse with the younger generation. They can't even use Swedish idioms so they switch to English. For example, they might know and use "You're on thin ice" but don't know what "Ute på hal is" eller "Ute på tunn is" means. If I say "det ligger en hund begraven här" they will look at me funnily and not understand what I mean. However, if I say "Something smells fishy" they will know.

People older than me used even funnier idioms that no one uses anymore. For example "Du ler förnöjt som en katt som nyss svalt en kanariefågel."

I don't know what to do about it, if anything. :/ Undoubtedly, it is easier if everyone speaks the same language. But it is also much less interesting and much less diverse.

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This is also my experience as a foreigner living in Iceland. Tech companies that I’ve worked at work in English and the language even in Icelandic is peppered with English technical terms and idioms. The terms generally exist in Icelandic but are just ignored since their invention tends to follow the English term becoming commonly used. Even socially English idioms pop up relatively frequently. I’ve only got young kids but have witnessed kids outside of that chatting away to one another in English for extended periods then switching back to Icelandic. It’s definitely an accelerating and new trend. My partner is Icelandic and most people of her generation are at least able to speak English if not comfortable with it. A generation older and I’ve met many people who can’t.

There are other interesting trends as well. The relatively good economic situation and contributing tourist boom mean you very often will be served in downtown Reykjavík by someone who doesn’t speak Icelandic. Icelanders are simply off doing other jobs. In the scheme of things it’s a small change but very noticeably different from when I moved here.

When I studied computer science in Uppsala ~ 25 years ago I remember a number of textbooks (in particular, from Pagina) that used Swedish words for absolutely everything ("betjänt" (server) comes to mind, I can't think of others at the moment). but a lot of those terms sounded odd to us and I don't remember anyone using them except perhaps to be funny.

But many words have more natural sounding translations that we did (and do) use, things like kompilator (compiler), kö (queue), träd (tree) etc. I left Sweden many years ago but still often use gurka as a metasyntactic variable.

BTW your "even funnier idiom" is well known in english as well (although I don't remember the last time I heard anyone say it):

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cat_that_ate_the_canary

This is actually quite odd. I'm learning Swedish myself as a second foreign language with English being the first one. I'd say my Swedish level is B1-B2, i.e. intermediate, so I'm very far from being fluent. But I understand the idioms you mentioned perfectly. I'm having a hard time imagining native speaker not getting them. Maybe they just think those idioms are old-fashioned?

Also, it sounds weird indeed when you use English phrases in your casual speech when direct translation exists. Like I was watching some old movie and a teen girl there said something like "Du, jag ska ha födelsedagskalas på fredag. I want you to come.". I even didn't catch it first.

And the worst part is that with the removal of the language barrier, people also all start to consume the same media.

And that means US culture starts to affect more and more people.

Already today people that primarily watch english media have significantly different views on driving children to school, or social safety than those who watch primarily media in the local language, even correcting for age, gender, education, etc.

It’s scary to see because it’s means more and more of the broken parts of US culture end up here in Europe as well.

What is preventing Europe from creating media that reflect their culture and exporting it to the world? If Europe could create music, movies, etc. that are more popular than the offerings from the US then... problem solved?

Simply said, economics. This is a winner-takes-all problem, nothing short of banning US media and forcing creation of a local media industry will be able to do that.

I don't really see it as a winner-takes-all situation. Here in the US my wife and I both enjoy many of the BBC productions, the 'Brit-com' comedy shows, and have noticed that a significant percentage to the actors even in US produced shows are from the UK or Australia.

It seems that there's plenty of room for good programs no matter what their country of origin.

How many German productions have you seen? How many French?

Germany and France each produce just as much or even more content than the UK.

Yet, none of this content ever leaves the country. British content can directly be sold on the US market, which means they can get much more money from those licensing deals to finance more productions.

The only situation where German or French productions show up internationally are nature documentaries (many of the documentaries the BBC or PBS show are produced by Germans, or as cooperation).

The English-speaking market is so large that English productions always have an advantage, and US productions even more. A US production reaches 300 million people in its home market, and a billion globally. A German production reaches 80 million in the home market, and 130 million globally.

And that's without the venefits hollywood has from having all the actors, staff and technology in one place.

This battle has been decided long ago.

> How many German productions have you seen? How many French?

Quite a few French, actually.

Also, Spanish, so much so that our cable TV provider offers several 'all Spanish all the time' cable stations.

Spanish is a bit complicated in this context because I think the question was about nation of origin not language (though language is the offered reason for French/German-origin productions being hard to export.) A lot of the Spanish-language content in the US is, I think, US origin. Though a fair amount is of Latin American (particularly Mexican) origin, and some from elsewhere. But, yeah, there is a lot of Spanish-language, foreign produced content consumed in the US, and not all by native Spanish speakers.

>Yet, none of this content ever leaves the country.

And whose fault is this? People enjoy Japanese media all over the world despite the language barrier. French media used to be very popular in my country, like for example Louis de Funès movies? Even Iceland produces media that's popular worldwide, like Lazy Town or Bjork.

Is there any pair of countries (A, B) so that A != USA, B != USA, and A consumes more movies from B than from USA?

I’d argue that no such pair of countries exists, except potentially ones with restricted media import rules, e.g. the pair of (North Korea, China).

There probably are (something like Sri-Lanka/India or Guatemala/Mexico), but even if there aren't, what is this supposed to indicate? Yes, USA has strong film industry, fueled by its strong economy and large population. American films are distributed worldwide and tend to be popular with people. There's no other country that can match USA in the sheer volume (maybe China and India). But when making a movie you don't need to compete with the entire country. You just need to produce something that's appealing to the audiences. Somebody from Bulgaria doesn't care if the movie is American or German made, it's going to be dubbed in Bulgarian anyway.

But that was exactly my point. The US movie industry is globally dominant, and through that, influencing other countries’ cultures.

But the EU has a greater population than the US. I don't know anything about economics, but surely the EU as a whole is as strong as the US economy. So... why can't the EU create a movie industry that is as dominant as Hollywood?

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